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0 pointsramses08y ago0 comments

Leadership is outward facing, attracting followers by sharing a vision, inspiration, goal and working with the team to achieve that goal.

Management is inward facing, paying attention to the people you are responsible for, and knowing the right thing that's needed at the right time.

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Leadership is building the boat, management is making sure the boat gets built, on time, on budget, with the proper permits and inspections, training and safety gear, along with bi-weekly status reports to customers.

Some people confuse one with the other, but to me they're distinct and this is a rough sketch of how I see them as different.

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scruple8y ago· 1 in thread

This is an interesting idea and it certainly seems to make sense to me to see it described this way. I am curious, though, can leader be a manager, and vice versa? Or, are these roles so distinct from each other that they should be separate? Maybe these roles can't co-exist at that level because it's exactly the problem that leads to so many of the problems we discuss on this site?

ramses0OP8y ago

I think that leadership skills naturally require a sharper focus than management skills (not to downplay the value of either).

There reaches a point where leadership requires you to take the manager gloves off and get your hands dirty. For small teams or small problems, a good leader/manager can be both one and the same.

However as the size of the team or problems grows, it becomes more difficult (think n^2) to tackle both issues at the same time with the same person.

Management issues (firing, hiring, expenses, budgets) and Leadership issues (decisions, progress, advocacy, examples) on a team of 5 may be doable by one person, but may be stretched with one person servicing a team of 15 or 150.

Or if there is a ton more problems in one area vs. others, the challenge of dealing with that problematic area can leave a gap on the "less problematic" areas, which eventually turn them into actual problems. That's my guess as to what people complain about the most.

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